Almost 2,000 objects from three disparate geographic areas are back on view at The Met in a light-filled wing overlooking Central Park redesigned by WHY Architecture and Beyer Blinder Belle. Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo were the original architects of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, which opened in 1982. Baaba Maal, a Senegalese musician, was invited to give opening words to inaugurate the wing’s reopening this week, as well as Māori dancers, and Nahuatl poets.
The 40,000-square-foot gallery has been closed since 2021, and has since undergone a $70 million renovation. The official reopening on May 31 comes amid other projects underway at The Met today, including ones by Frida Escobedo, Peterson Rich Office, and NADAAA. It likewise poses important questions about the ethics of displaying Indigenous artworks at places like the Met, Nelson Rockefeller’s legacy, and decolonization and repatriation more broadly.
The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing has three halls: The Met’s Arts of Africa, Ancient Americas, and Oceania galleries. The Arts of Africa section has modern paintings by Senegalese artist Iba N’Diaye that coalesce near centuries-old works by Bamileke, Okak-Fang, and Sakalava artists. Huastec, Mexica, Chiriqui, Olmec, Toltec, Tairona, Moche, and Chimú artists abound inside the Ancient Americas Gallery; with Fijian, Sawos, Tami Islands, and Asmat artists in the Oceanic Gallery. Noŋgirrŋa Marawili’s Baratjala is a more recent artwork on view from 2022.
Previously, Roche and Dinkeloo’s design had low ceilings, drab lighting, and felt disjointed from The Met. The new iteration is all white, mechanical equipment and gallery lighting is concealed by ribs that echo the institution’s Gothic elements. Art pieces were removed from the walls and made freestanding, recalling Lina Bo Bardi’s São Paulo Museum of Art, or maybe OMA’s Fondazione Prada in Milan.
“For me, it’s meaningful,” Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architecture told AN while standing in the wing, looking out at Central Park. “This is a place where three quarters of the world are in one wing together, regions that have nothing to do with one another. To be able to give them the respect and place to shine is special.” From an architecture perspective, he elaborated, “the idea was to let the park be a part of the experience. We also talked about drawing from the architecture references of Africa, Oceania, and the ancient Americas. The galleries discern slightly, but feel like one unified experience.”
“Before, walking into the wing felt like going into a basement. It also didn’t relate to the rest of The Met,” Yantrasast elaborated. “The Greek, Roman, and American sections, and even the Great Hall, have arches and vaults. The curve that greets you allows for a soft transition from the high ceiling, to the low ceiling. The idea was to bring this architectural DNA into the Rockefeller Wing to give it a hint of continuity. This is also where we were able to hide a lot of the fixtures.”
Cruz Garcia, a professor at Iowa State University and Columbia GSAPP, taught a studio about decolonizing The Met for four years with Nathalie Frankowski. “Teaching about colonialism at Columbia as it brutalizes its own anti-colonial students means confronting a simple, violent truth: The institutions that shape our understanding of history are the ones trying to keep real, critical history away from us,” Garcia told AN in regard to the Rockefeller Wing’s reopening.
“The recent reopening of the Rockefeller Wing at The Met—framed by the New York Times as a celebration of the ‘family of collectors, and Indigenous art’—is a case study in how power sanitizes itself,” Garcia added. “In our classes, we’ve dissected how museums like The Met function not as neutral repositories of culture, but as active enforcers of colonial logic, where loot is rebranded as patrimony, violence is aestheticized into silence, and asymmetrical power is rendered as transactional provenance. The Rockefellers are emblematic of this machinery.”
“This Isn’t About the Past”
The Met is a famous example of architectural parafiction designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, later added onto by Richard Morris Hunt, Kyu Sung Woo, and others. So too is the ground underneath it, Central Park, by Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted. The soil Vaux and Olmsted used to make Central Park was violently taken from the Chincha Islands off of Peru during the Guano Wars (1864–1866).
Central Park was finished just a few years after the Guano Wars ended, what Rem Koolhaas called a “synthetic arcadian carpet” quite literally made of Peruvian bird dung (“guano”). The Met opened in 1872, likewise synthesizing disparate styles into a gothic, baroque, and Beaux-Arts strange brew, an eclectic display of U.S. chauvinism.
The pieces on view in the Rockefeller Wing today span eight millennia across five continents that don’t really have anything to do with one another besides the fact they were colonized by imperial powers for over four centuries. Many were acquired by Nelson A. Rockefeller during his tenure as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (1940–1944), a U.S. government office notorious for meddling in Latin American politics, and during other foreign appointments.
Nelson Rockefeller was head of the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC) between 1947 and 1958. He brought Robert Moses to Brazil to “modernize” São Paulo at IBEC, “resulting in a total deforested area equivalent to the territory of Portugal and Italy combined,” according to Brazilian architect Paulo Tavares, among other terrible consequences for Venezuela. Nelson’s son, Michael, died on an expedition in Papua, Indonesia, in 1961—Nelson announced plans to build a wing in his honor at The Met in 1969.
The Rockefeller Wing’s spoils, many collected by Michael himself in the Pacific islands, were first displayed in 1957 at The Museum of Primitive Art inside a Manhattan townhome Nelson owned on West 54th Street, around the time he left IBEC to run for elected office, leading up to his Governorship. In 1982, the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing opened at The Met à la Roche and Dinkeloo, two decades after Michael’s death, where its namesake’s collection was transferred. The wing was closed off to the public in 2021, when the renovation by WHY Architecture began.
Garcia is critical of writers who overlook this history. “When we encounter a Taíno zemi, made by my ancestors, in the Rockefeller Wing, we don’t see an artifact; we see a corporate-colonial pipeline, one that runs from the genocidal conquest of the Caribbean to the Ivy League classrooms where these histories are still too often softened into ‘critique.’”
“This isn’t about the past,” Garcia continued. “It’s about why, in 2025, institutions like Columbia and The Met still resist restitution, still platform colonial apologia, still train students to admire rather than dismantle these systems, and, in the case of Columbia, persecute students when they dare to question their colonialism. The Rockefellers understood that control over narrative is control over power. Our work is to rupture that control—to insist that a stolen zemi is not a curio or a trophy, but a land claim, and that a museum wing bearing their name is not a tribute, but a crime scene.”
At the press preview this week, Indigenous art curators who specialize in repatriation addressed this antagonism. Baaba Maal spoke about the legacy of Iba N’Diaye, and what it means to him to see N’Diaye displayed at The Met. “I think it’s an honor and a privilege to come here, and to see the people that come from your country or your continent,” Maal told AN. “Iba is one of the greatest artists in Africa. He had a very hard life. To see The Met put him at the front, and to make a new generation of people love his paintings and art is a great honor.”
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